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bettie

Bettie's Books

A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.

Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, Johanna Ward (Narrator)

Cousin Bette - Francine Prose, Honoré de Balzac, Kathleen Raine

bookshelves: published-1846, france, winter20092010, classic, fraudio, revenge

Read in January, 2010

 

 - James Waring, Translator
- Unabridged
- 12 Tapes = 17 Hrs. 30 Mins
- Blackstone Audiobooks
- January 2000

BLURB - “Bette is a wronged soul; and when her passion does break, it is, as Balzac says, sublime and terrifying,” wrote V. S. Pritchett. A late masterpiece in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, Cousin Bette is the story of a Vosges peasant who rebels against her scornful upper-class relatives, skillfully turning their selfish obsessions against them. The novel exemplifies what Henry James described as Balzac’s “huge, all-compassing, all-desiring, all-devouring love of reality.”

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FROM WIKI - French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicted lesbian relationships similar to (though more explicit than) that of Bette and Valérie, as in his 1893 painting "In Bed"



Lisbeth Fischer (Cousin Bette) is described as "maigre, brune ... les sourcils épais et réunis par un bouquet ... quelques verrues dans sa face longue et simiesque" ("lean, brown, with ... thick eyebrows joining in a tuft ... and some moles on her narrow simian face")